Chapter 9: Ski Lodge

The barge put us ashore on a gravel bar at midnight, and thirty-one people vanished into the dark.

Some had a cousin in a town to the east.

Some had only the road.

We kept three: Bixby, Jonas and me.

Three months' rations, dead or alive, was written beside our names in that ledger.

Bixby had the ledger page folded inside his shirt, and the toll-keeper's price was now on us.

Jonas said any stranger who read that number would sell us to the first patrol, so we walked off the gravel bar into the pines without a light.

An abandoned ski lodge stood at the edge of the pines a mile up the slope.

Its windows were boarded, and a rental shop filled the ground floor.

Jonas checked every room.

He came back and said the building was empty.

"I checked the locks too," he said. "We can sleep."

Bixby dropped his pack by the stone fireplace in the lobby, lay down on a leather couch with his boots on, and was snoring within a minute.

His coat lay over the arm of the couch.

I stood at the rental counter with a lantern, not sleeping, and Jonas came to stand behind me.

"You're thinking," he said.

"I'm not."

"You are. You have a line between your eyebrows."

"I'm thinking that I've been married for eight years and I never heard my husband say one true word."

"That isn't what you were thinking."

"No," I said, and turned around.

I took him by the front of his flight jacket and walked him backward into the shop's dark back room, where the ski wax shelves stood.

He let me.

I shut the door and pushed him down onto the long wooden fitting bench.

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